The virtual green tea museum
The virtual green tea museum is the first online-museum that specifically focusses on green tea. Its online exhibition features a private, non-commercial, scholarly collection of tea packages and images that have been assembled since 2005 in an ongoing effort to document vibrant West African green tea cultures.
The museum intends to share these tea cultures with a wider public and invites to reflect upon the social life of manufactured products that is shaped by their journeys and pathways across continents, religious affiliations, cultural contexts and historical constellations in times of globalization.
The West Africa Exhibition “Teatime in the Sahel” displays a collection of more than 150 different green tea packages in Mali and adjacent countries. It follows their journey from China to West Africa, historically and at present, and provides insights in a vibrant culture of remembrance related to the tea package designs.
The virtual museum also encourages visitors to include their own images to enrich this online exhibition. In case you have such tea packages yourself and like to supplement the virtual collection with your tea packages and other information, you are invited to contact us at info@virtualgreenteemuseum.de
Acknowledgements
This online museum project has been supported by the project “Africa’s Asian Options” (AFRASO), at Goethe University Frankfurt (2013-2019), funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and the Schule des Sehens, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where some of the materials have been exhibited from 7 February until 25 April 2019.
